nowfound

Life & fun · February 7, 2016

TY

Tracing You, a website that tries to “see” where its visitors are

A computational surveillance system that presents a website

Tracing You, a website that tries to “see” where its visitors are launched on February 7, 2016 with 65 votes, #1,185 of 4,386 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 10 years on.

Visit tracingyou.bengrosser.com ↗Alternatives

In plain words

Tracing You is a computational system that attempts to identify the physical location of website visitors by cross-referencing IP addresses with available online data sources. It then displays satellite or street-level imagery of the traced location, which may be accurate or significantly off-target. The project invites visitors to explore what information can be inferred about their environment based on digital traces left online and questions why such tracking systems exist.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Tracing You presents a website's best attempt to see the world from its visitors' viewpoints. By cross referencing visitor IP addresses with available online data sources, the system traces each visitor back through the network to its possible origin. The end of that trace is the closest available image that potentially shows the visitor's physical environment. Sometimes what this image shows is eerily accurate; other times it is wildly dislocated. What can a computational system know of our environment based on the traces we leave behind? Why might it want to see where we are? How accurate are the system's data sources and when might they improve? Finally, what does this site's attempt to…from tracingyou.bengrosser.com

Does a similar job

all alternatives →

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗

Launched alongside, February 2016

the whole month →